and she will have her redemption
by Jemennuie
Summary: Because Narcissa has always wanted a perfect life and with each step it only seems to slip further and further away. Perhaps, she hopes, it is not too late for the fresh beginnings and follies of youth. For the HPFC Forum Wide Competition.


A/N: The story icon is a fanart of Narcissa borrowed from Makani on Deviantart. This one-shot was written for the seventh challenge of the Forum Wide Competition at the HPFC; my house is Gryffindor and my assigned pairing was Narcissa/Theo.

**and she will have her redemption**

He is holding her hand, gently stroking each of her intertwined fingers with his thumb as he leans over and, like a shy school boy, softly brushes her wavy strands of hair away to tickle her ear with a whisper. Between them sits their son, his face shaped by a round smile and the chubby cheeks of a babyhood not yet gone, adoringly gazing up his two parents.

"Mummmmyyyy!" Narcissa's morose observation of the family sitting across the table from them – the Notts - is interrupted by the whine of her son, the impatient tugging of small fingers on the cuff of her 300 Galleon robes. She chews the bottom of her lip and slides her gaze to Lucius, hoping that perhaps he will respond to Draco's behavior, a comforting word or a light scolding, but he is too occupied with talking with the waiter, a frown creasing his brow and his hands energetically gesticulating, to notice the whining four-year old at his elbow.

"I'm so glad our families could meet for lunch," the woman sitting across the table from Narcissa leans forward and clasps both of her hands together in an earnest gesture, the shining of her widely opened eyes only accentuating her youthful air of careless beauty and certainty.

"Me too, Dahlia, me too." Narcissa tries to smile back but the muscles in her face feel like the stretched elastic of a broken rubber band and the contorting of her red lipstick looks more like a grimace than a smile.

Narcissa, excavating through the folds of her brain like a lost spelunker, cannot remember whether the Notts are family friends or relatives, for the details of tenuous connection between the two families has long been buried underneath the branches and leaves of several generations of family trees; it is of no matter, though, for the connection is there and once two purebloods make such a connection, it is never broken.

"Muuummmyyy!" Draco whines again. "I'm boooored!"

Dahlia glances at Draco before turning back to her own son and lightly stroking her son's dark fringe out of his eyes. Theo Nott, his hands quietly clasped in his lap, blinks at Narcissa and Draco in a mildly intrigued manner for just a moment before lovingly returning his attention to his parents and re-creating the picture of a perfect family.

.o.o.o.

Narcissa had somehow assumed that, like the statues of Egyptian pharaohs, the perfect family of the Notts would stand for all time, a relic to what the perfect pureblood family _should_ be. It had not occurred to her that the image of the perfect family could receive cracks and lose important pieces, like the glass shards of a damaged photo frame.

But the facts stand that their family is no longer complete, that Dahlia Nott has withered and crumbled like an autumn leaf under the crushing weight of an untreatable illness, leaving her family incomplete and her husband with nothing but their only son, and the title 'widower.'

Besides seas of black robes, artificially neat squares of appetizers at the reception, and a heavy feeling to the air, Narcissa is not sure what to expect at the funeral. Will Dahlia's son even be there? He is only Draco's age – just six – and it is, strictly speaking, not proper etiquette for children to attend funerals; she cannot even recall if she understood the entirety, the finality of death when she was only six, and who knows how a six-year old without their mother might act at a funeral? Perhaps he would loudly cry throughout the entire service, perhaps his howls of mourning might interrupt the eulogy, perhaps he would be angry, snap at guests and misbehave and use accidental magic – all of these would be rude behavior for a funeral and she can't imagine a six-year old knowing proper funeral etiquette.

To her surprise, though, Theo Nott is there, and his cheeks are sunken with grief and his eyes are moist and he sniffles a bit during the service but other than that he plays the perfect role of a polite, properly raised pureblood (and Narcissa can barely believe he's only a child, because even Lucius is acting more immature than that by complaining to her about how the service is too long.)

.o.o.o.

When Draco starts Hogwarts, Narcissa is disappointed to learn that his closest friendships have formed with Crabbe and Goyle (those two boulders of boys who have no class, no refinement, nothing but the sort of rough brute strength and poorly chiseled presence that they have inherited from their similarly dislikeable parents). She knows that she cannot control her son's life, that even if she would prefer him to be friends with the other two Slytherin boys in his year – Blaise and Theo – she cannot forcibly make him break off his friendship with Crabbe and Goyle. Surely, though, there is nothing wrong with inviting _family_ friends for dinner and tea, is there? The Zaibinis are not close enough to the Malfoys to be frequent guests, but the Notts are, and after many visits to Malfoy Manor on the Notts' part, something resembling the beginning of a friendship starts blossoming between Draco and Theo.

Narcissa smiles when Theo starts visiting Draco on his own during school breaks, because they spend more time talking about their classes and less time talking about Quidditch and unlike Crabbe and Goyle, Theo says "Please" and "Thank you" and calls her "Mrs. Malfoy." She hopes that Draco will gradually adopt the other boy's quiet, well-spoken manners and that her son will learn to drop the belligerent, self-confident edge to so many of his words and phrasings, but perhaps that is an unrealistic expectation for a thirteen-year old boy. Like so many of her younger years, Narcissa can only recall a vague blur of her time as a thirteen-year old, of sneaking make-up from Bellatrix's dresser drawer, and butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks, and professors and homework and the Winter Ball and she certainly can't remember how polite she was to her elders. A vague memory of Lucius treating everyone with the same sort of self-assured swagger that Draco adopts (and which Lucius still adopts sometimes) comes to her mind and she silently hopes again that perhaps Draco will take after Theo, Theo who is and always has been the epitome of politeness.

.o.o.o.

When she discovers that her husband's status as a Death Eater has been unmasked, Narcissa finds herself nearly numb with disbelief, a constricting feeling wrapping around her ribcage like a venomous snake, suffocating the air from her lungs. It is not Lucius's imprisonment that directly worries her (because even if she cares about him to some extent, compulsive worrying about one's spouse does not generally come with arranged marriages such as theirs). Rather, it is the uncertainty of her future and her son's future – both financially and socially – that is wearing her nerves raw.

Narcissa spends her days squeezing her hands together, pacing holes in the thick carpets of Malfoy Manor, and wishing that Lucius had never become a Death Eater while Draco spends his days angrily proclaiming that the ministry had no right to arrest his father and how dare Potter contribute to his father's capture.

Theo Nott, his father's arrest having forced him to leave his ancestral home to come live with the Malfoys, does not appear to spend his time ceaselessly cursing the fates or hopelessly wondering about the future, despite being a minor without any remaining family. There is a certain tightness to his jaw, a curtness to his words when discussing the Death Eaters with Draco, but his behavior is otherwise the same: polite, practical, sensible. When she overhears Draco discussing the possibility of joining the Death Eaters, Theo briefly replies that even though he agrees with their philosophy he thinks it unwise to join a group and, in doing so, willingly relinquish one's control over one's own life; Narcissa silently wishes that Lucius had been that sensible, but Lucius made his choice long ago and now she and their son are suffering the repercussions as their sense of stability comes crashing down around their ears.

Theo spends the summer in the Malfoy library, reading textbooks in preparation for the upcoming school year, and sometimes Narcissa finds herself lingering at the doorway of the library, because there is something inexplicably calming about watching Theo, a sort of stability lacking in other parts of her life that makes her feel as though perhaps she will be able to survive this tumultuous period after all.

.o.o.o.

Narcissa knows she should be thankful that, with the end of the war, her entire family has avoided imprisonment, but it is the sense of despair and stagnancy hanging in the air that threatens to suffocate her – the Malfoy reputation ruined, Lucius and Draco spend most of their time pacing the Manor like caged animals, the former chasing the impossible dream of regaining the Malfoys' former glory, the latter unable to reconcile himself with entering the work force without the privilege of the financial and status-based support of the Malfoy name.

The ancestral Nott home has been claimed by the Ministry for 'administrative technicalities' due to Theo's father being sentenced to life in Azkaban and thus, Theo, the final shard of the perfect family that inspired Narcissa's envy so many years ago, is continuing to live at Malfoy Manor. Unlike Lucius and Draco, though, he does not seem to consider himself above the lower-level entry positions of the work force, and Narcissa idly wishes that she could convince her husband and son to be that hard-working, that humble; Theo will surely manage to rebuild a name for himself before the Malfoys at this rate, and the stagnant swamp of willingly helpless frustration radiating from the members of her family is just about to make her go mad. She wishes she could start anew, and she finds it ridiculous (almost, but not quite) that she's in her forties and entertaining ideas of running away from home (but doesn't she deserve the redemption of a second chance at that perfect family?)

But she knows the closest she will ever get to that perfect beginning, that perfect middle, that perfect happily-ever-after ending, is when she watches Theo meticulously doing his grunt office work in the evenings, when the constricting helplessness wrapping its way around her lungs loosens a bit and for a moment she feels a bit of hope and the idea of starting over doesn't seem like a nebulous, impossible construct drilled into her brain by too many fairy tales, but instead something as concrete as the quill Theo holds in his hands, the way his fringe falls in front of his eyes when scrutinizing the parchment, the way he lightly bites his thumbnail when thinking. With the freshness to his face, the youthful promise it radiates, it almost seems as though the opportunities for new chances are endless. And it's ridiculous, because she's too old for a new beginning and could never create the perfect family or the reputation of the Notts fifteen years ago, but she almost wants to try anyway —

.o.o.o.

"Theo told me that he's planning to move out by the end of the week," Lucius drawls in a disinterested sort of way.

"Oh?" Narcissa replies to her husband's statement in a forcibly neutral manner. "Did he give any reasons why?"

"No; I assume he just wants to move onto the next stage of his life. That's the thing about being young," he gives a dry laugh, "You always have somewhere to go, something to progress towards."

A polite smile is the only acknowledgment she gives of his words (because she knows why Theo's leaving, because she can still hear him saying "_Mrs. Malfoy, what are you doing?_" and "_Mrs. Malfoy, I don't think that's appropriate_," and feel the sting of rejection)

(because there was never any redemption in youth, anyway)

...

A/N: Reviews and/or constructive criticism are always appreciated, especially if you favorite the piece.


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